Oh, Atilla! You make many great points in this article, but I think you also missing much. While you are right that most of the WWW, at this point, is commercial, let's not forget that it started out non-commercial, information being shared for free. I believe that if, somehow, all commercial value was taken out of it today, it would still thrive, in perhaps a much smaller form, as a wonderful world of creativity, sharing, and connection. It would be much more beautiful without the almighty dollar enshitifying it, as Cory Doctorow puts it.

As to AI and Google, I currently find myself using GPT-4 (bing.com/new) for about half of what I would have used google search for. I didn't see much value in GTP-3/3.5 (ChatGPT) but GPT-4 is really good. It an, of course, be used for many things, but I use it mainly as the holy grail of search: plain language input and focused, plain-language output, usually pretty accurate. And, at least on Bing, it provides references (links) so I can easily cross-check the information or go down a rabbit hole if I choose. Bing/GPT-3.5 also has audio input and output and I was starting to like that. I hope they add it to GPT-4 soon. I think it may already be available with a paid subscription, but god, I really hate paid subscriptions.

I guess I'll stop there for now, except to mention that I hope we all know that Lilly Collins is the daughter of musician Phil Collins ("I can feel it in the air tonight, oh lord..."). Somehow I find that is charming, although: nepo-baby!